Digital Mortgage Platform Better To Buy UK FinTech Trussle

Better, the digital mortgage lender, will be purchasing Trussle, the U.K.-based digital mortgage and insurance broker, CNBC wrote Monday (July 12).

Trussle is also backed by Goldman Sachs, Finch Capital and others, and the deal values Trussle at $9 million.

The pandemic brought about a frenzy of mortgage refinancing in the U.S. In accordance with that, Better extended almost $25 billion in loans in 2020.

The Better platform moves loans online. Customers gain the opportunity to sign and upload eSign documents, and the company said it has the ability to cut down the times for closing from the 42-day industry average to 21 days.

In addition, Better founder Vishal Garg has said that the more digital-focused approach has had societal benefits by making it harder to discriminate against minorities applying for mortgage loans. That helps to combat the results of a National Bureau of Economic Research study the company saw which said face-to-face lending applications often result in rejections of minority applications around 6 percent of the time.

In addition, minority applicants are also charged more overall as opposed to nonminorities.

“Better and Trussle were both founded on the understanding that consumers increasingly prefer to use online services to shop for and transact on major life purchases,” Trussle CEO Ian Larkin said in a press release announcing the deal, per CNBC.

Garg has said Better was formed because of an incident where an all-cash buyer was able to secure a house buy ahead of him as Garg was using a traditional mortgage lender.

Better also recently partnered with American Express and Rocket Mortgage in order to do home loans. Amex customers who get mortgages from either company will now have the ability to access a statement credit for $2,000 for conforming mortgages or $6,000 for jumbo ones.